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Monday, March 25, 2013

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)

Long before he was Executive A.D.A. Ben Stone on Law & Order Michael Moriarty had a lucrative career in terrible horror movies. He may be famous for playing a hard hitting lawyer in the early seasons of L&O but I will always remember him in great roles as that guy in Q and that guy in It’s Alive 3: Isle of The Alive.

New York police are bemused by a spate of reports of a giant flying lizard that has been spotted around the rooftops of New York, which they assume to be bogus until the lizard starts to eat people. An out-of-work, ex-con piano player is the only person who knows the location of the monster's nest and is determined to turn the knowledge to his advantage, but will his gamble pay off or will he end up as lizard food?

Genre pioneer Larry Cohen, who broke new horror ground with the killer-baby hit It's Alive!, takes a stab at the giant-monster scenario with this enjoyable low-budget exercise. The title refers to the winged Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, represented here as a dragon-like flying lizard (thanks to some quaint but amusing stop-motion animation from David Allen), who decides to take up residence in the art-deco spire of the Chrysler Building, taking frequent jaunts in the midday sun to nip the heads off various hapless New Yorkers. The resulting bloody mess confounds detectives Shepard (David Carradine) and Powell (Richard Roundtree), who are already scratching their heads over a series of bizarre ritual murders linked to a secret Aztec cult. Into the picture comes the film's protagonist -- neurotic, sweaty, paranoid crook Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty, in a tour-de-force performance), a two-bit wheel-man with aspirations of becoming a jazz pianist. After a botched diamond heist leads Quinn to Q's lair, his attempts to go straight take a side-turn as he decides to extort from the city an enormous sum in exchange for directions to the monster's nest. A few sneaky deals later, the location falls into Shepard's hands, and he leads a paramilitary assault on the Chrysler Building, where the creature's humongous egg is about to hatch. Rude, edgy, fast-paced, and peppered with witty dialogue (most of which can't be repeated here), Cohen's script retains the spirit of classic monster movies like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, injecting it with tough, gangster-movie moxie. Moriarty's unbelievable performance -- one of three collaborations with Cohen -- finds him chewing acres of scenery as a contemptible, loud-mouthed goon who's too funny to hate; Moriarty also composed and performed two schizophrenic piano numbers for the film.

The movie was shot on location in and around New York city's Chrysler Building and uses the interior of the building's tower crown as a primary location. The original music score was composed by Robert O. Ragland. The film was marketed with the tagline "It's [sic] name is Quetzalcoatl... just call it Q, that's all you'll have time to say before it tears you apart!" The film poster's glossy monster illustration was painted by science fiction/fantasy artist Boris Vallejo.

The film was given a limited release theatrically in the United States by United Film Distribution Company in October 1982. It grossed approximately $255,000 at the box office. The film was later released on VHS by MCA/Universal Home Video. It was released on DVD by Blue Underground in 2003.

About the Author

Michael currently works as a technician in the Entertainment Industry, he has been a comedian, a musician, an actor, a radio personality and The King of Sweden for about 2 months. He and his wife are currently working on the script for their own horror movie and he was written two novels and a dozen short stories...every one rejected by publishers. He is also the Patron Saint of Promotion and is personally responsible for the failure of two (2) financial institutions.